Featured Poem

• Choler

  Bruce Bond

  ---

  Somewhere in the middle of the new novel, 
  Frankenstein the monster is reading a romance 

  entitled Frankenstein. To think 
  he came this far without it, it made his life 

  more romantic, more cloaked in fog, out 
  there, as childhood is before the child recalls. 

  It drew him breathless to the passage 
  he awakens to his father—or should I say, 

  his maker—who is too busy feeling horrible 
  to pity the face whose comely portions, 

  gleaned by lantern, shovel, long nausea, 
  and criminal risk, comprise the abject whole. 

  The yellow eyes tell us the creature’s liver 
  will not, cannot, purify his blood. It is, 

  after all, a stranger in the wilderness 
  of tendon and vein. Imagine the throb 

  of all that stitchery, how the seams moved 
  when he moved, how it felt to breathe. 

  And the creature (as our reader) thinks, clarity, 
  it takes so much out, the way it wrestles 

  one nature from another, one clear cloud 
  from clouds in the word cloud. He thinks, 

  clear, as death is, and the blade that cuts a child 
  into life, and the scar that seals the wound.

  Then he looks up and stares into fields
  of sky and the headstones of the saved.

  Was it René Descartes who said, It’s simple.
  If you cannot give me your heart, I’ll tear 

  it out. Or was that some other creature.
  And just like that, the sky turns back to sky. 

  Just like that, each broken part is never broken 
  only, as kindness cannot, be, or a laugh 

  defaced by the laughter of the others.
  I think therefore I read from a distance,

  he says to his writer. My face the screen
  on which the nightmare of a face begins. 

  In the laboratory chapter, transmogrified
  here, lightning strikes the metal spire,

  and the yellow eye that opens sees
  a yellow world. Or it would if the story

  looked, distracted as we are by clouds
  of dust the Tesla coil razors with its light.

  The long depressive curtain, the castle 
  stone limned in green, the thin insistent

  incursions of rain that scarify the mortar, 
  what are they if not a promissory note,

  the slung burden and authoritative bell 
  of dreams we take, in dreams, for dead.

  The yellow eye wakes, and death’s antagonist—
  let us call him scientist, father, creator, god—

  draws back in shame and horror from his one 
  creation. He sees in him a miracle confusion, 

  drenched in the bile that is our birthright, 
  and says, in silence, hell. What did I expect. 

  Did I think the fevers of the world would burst 
  into flames. That the ache of the mother 

  or criminal or survivor kneeling to the casket 
  would crumple into wonder. That the romance 

  of a strange new science would sweep a body 
  in its arms and the phoenix of two clear eyes emerge. 

  Ask the child abandoned in a closet, 
  where does the darkness end, the hand begin. 

  The punished flesh gives to punishment 
  a flesh. A hand that, in darkness, opens 

  the vellum of the hand of the boy alone. 
  At the dark dawn of the new childhood, 

  a boy writes a page no one reads, least 
  of all a monster. But here we are, reading, 

  asking, whose body is this that is everywhere 
  and nowhere. Whose choler in the blood 

  and hair he sheds, the cavity he scars, 
  the broken amber of the radiant heart. 

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